


Second Level Prestidigitation for Apprentice Magicians

by DesertScribe



Category: Magic for Beginners - Kelly Link
Genre: Gen, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-18
Updated: 2018-12-18
Packaged: 2019-09-22 02:42:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,982
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17051534
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DesertScribe/pseuds/DesertScribe
Summary: SometimesThe Libraryis the kind of show that makes you wait weeks for a new episode so you can finally know if your fave lived or died, and then makes you wait even longer while it pulls what looks like a bait and switch with what looks almost like a rerun, but you should always trust that there is method to the madness.





	Second Level Prestidigitation for Apprentice Magicians

**Author's Note:**

  * For [SoulJelly](https://archiveofourown.org/users/SoulJelly/gifts).



Once there had been an episode of _The Library_ that was almost nothing but Prince Wing and Faithful Margaret having a surprisingly ordinary and boring picnic. It had been one of the very first episodes that anyone saw air, and it opened with white letters spelling out, "Years in the future...," on a black background like something out of an old silent movie. Then it showed Prince Wing and Faithful Margaret sitting around on a picnic blanket, having tea and sandwiches under what appeared to be one of the many lesser trees of knowledge grown from cuttings of the World Tree.

This went on interminably long with nothing else happening, until near the end of the episode when Prince Wing pulled out a simple gold ring with a square-cut red gem and asked Faithful Margaret to marry him. Faithful Margaret looked flustered and hemmed and hawed for a little while, which was somewhat amusing because even back then it was very obvious that Faithful Margaret was not very faithful at all. At last, Faithful Margaret said that, yes, she would agree to marry Prince Wing, and he slid the ring onto her finger. Then they went back to eating their tea and sandwiches. When the last of the food and drink was gone, Faithful Margaret asked Prince Wing how long he wanted to wait before they had the wedding, and he replied that putting the ring on her finger was the only ceremony he needed to make her his forever. Then he leaned forward and kissed her, and the usual nonsensical credits at the end of the episode began to roll.

The episode is almost universally condemned by fans as being the most boring and useless hour of filler in the entire series. Even the episode which took place in the dark and in Morse code is better liked, because at least that one has some good jokes in it. Those fans who felt charitable said it was good for the makers of the show to get a clunker of an episode like the picnic one out of their system early so they could learn from their mistakes and do better the next time. Those who felt less charitable were not nearly so polite when discussing the subject. Even the most diehard Wing/Margaret shippers are forced to admit that, all things considered, it's a pretty dull episode and when they rewatch it they fast-forward through ninety percent of it, assuming they rewatch it at all. In the two years since the episode aired, the everts of that episode have never been alluded to again, and everyone who pays much attention to convoluted story of _The Library_ has come to the conclusion that it has been retconned out of the timeline thanks to one or more of the times our heroes or the Forbidden Books have rewritten the past and therefore the future. No one considers that to be a loss, not even the most diehard Wing/Margaret shippers, because they tend to feel certain that when Prince Wing finally gets around to proposing to Faithful Margaret for real, it will be under circumstances which are much more exciting and romantic.

In another episode of _The Library_ , Prince Wing and Faithful Margaret sit around on a picnic blanket, having tea and sandwiches under what appears to be one of the many lesser trees of knowledge grown from cuttings of the World Tree, and it takes Jeremy Mars, fifteen years old and sitting on a couch in Hell's Bells, a spooky themed wedding chapel in Las Vegas far from his friends and home, three minutes of dawning horror to realize that he is watching the same picnic as the boring one he grudgingly sat through when he was thirteen and then spent the next week complaining to his friends about how it had been the worst episode ever and if they ever aired another one like that he was going to quit watching the show.

He wants to say that this episode is even worse now than the one two years ago was, because he has spent weeks anxiously waiting to discover whether the character of Fox, who Prince Wing betrayed and attacked and possibly murdered and who Jeremy may have stolen books from an Iowa library for, will live and return from the red wastelands beyond the Free People's World-Tree Library doors or if she has died from her injuries and is gone forever, but now that a new episode is finally airing it might as well be a rerun aside from beginning with a title card which says, "Tomorrow...," instead of, "Years in the future...." and if this is going the be the same as the previous picnic, then he knows Fox will not participate or be mentioned in the episode at all beyond a brief glimpse of her shown in the fifteen second flashback shown while Prince Wing tells Faithful Margaret where the ring came from as a lead-up to asking her to marry him.

Jeremy only keeps his mouth shut because he does not want to look like a whining child in front of these strange adults at the wedding chapel who he has only just met and doesn't really know yet. Instead, he crosses his arms over his chest, slouches low in his seat, and start thinking about what he is going to say to Elizabeth about the situation as soon as the episode is over. In his fit of teenage pique, Jeremy almost tunes out the episode entirely. Almost, but not quite, and as the minutes tick by, he begins noticing what he thinks might be small differences in this episode from the one he remembers watching.

He would have to find a copy of the old episode and rewatch it to be sure, but while all the actions and dialogue seemed to be the same, hadn't the old version had the camera pointing at Prince Wing instead of Faithful Margaret when the giant bumblebee the size of a bowling ball flew between the two of them, moving so fast you almost couldn't see the string it was hanging from, and almost made them both drop their sandwiches into their teacups? He definitely did not remember seeing an ominous group of indistinct figures silently dart through the background behind Faithful Margaret while she giggled at Prince Wing's reaction to the bee and brushed crumbs off of her shirt. And, last time around, didn't the camera mostly focus on Faithful Margaret as Prince Wing proposed? Jeremy was sure he would have thought the old episode was more interesting if it had shown Prince Wing secretly clutching that knife in one hand behind his back until Faithful Margaret agreed to be his wife and let him put the ring on her finger? And now that Jeremy thought about it, the actions of the flashback to Prince Wing getting the gold ring with the square-cut red gem looked exactly like a brief scene which had taken place in the previous episode if you replaced flashback-Fox with the Forbidden Book who had the especially pointy hair and the cancellation stamp shaped scar on her cheek.

Judging by the quiet mutterings of everyone else around him, Jeremy is not the only one noticing these discrepancies. Miss Thing sounds like she has rewatched that old episode quite a lot and is quietly whispering a list of differences in Jeremy's mother's ear. Jeremy shimmies up out of his slouch and leans over to better hear Miss Thing while also beginning to pay much more attention to what's happening on screen. Maybe this episode is not going to be as bad as he thought it was.

Still, if it makes him wait until the following episode before it drops any hints about what happened to Fox, then he is going to scream, or at least yell in a very manly and mature way.

* * *

An hour later, the credits have rolled, the television has been turned off, and Jeremy's mother is heading to bed because she is tired from the drive, and the only reason why Jeremy has not screamed and is not still screaming is because the wedding chapel phone started ringing even before the end of the episode and has not stopped since, and Jeremy does not want to be shushed by one of the chapel workers while they are on the phone. He keeps hoping that one of these calls will be from Elizabeth, or from Talis, or from Amy, or even from Karl so he can vent his frustration to someone who understands him, or from Fox so he can try to get answers from her, maybe answers to just small questions if she isn't willing to answer big ones but is still willing to talk. But, so far, every call has been about someone wanting to book the chapel for a wedding or renewal of vows. Jeremy had once wondered what kind of people might get married in a place like Hell's Bells, and now he knows that at least some percentage of those people is comprised of fans of _The Library_ who have been inspired by tonight's episode. He feels like he should maybe be less surprised by this fact, but he is too busy feeling frustrated and very far from his home and friends to have much of an opinion about it one way or the other.

It is two thousand six hundred eighty eight miles back to Plantagenet, Vermont if you take the shortest possible route and go through Canada. Jeremy knows because he looked it up online before he and his mother started this trip. The internet also says that he can cover that distance if he walks for eight hundred eighty four hours, which when Jeremy does the math comes out to mean that he would need to travel at a very tiny bit above 3.04 miles per hour. Jeremy's coach has devoted a lot of time to determining how fast Jeremy runs and then improving that number, but nobody has ever bothered to determine how fast Jeremy walks. Maybe he already naturally walks at a very tiny bit above 3.04 miles per hour and just doesn't know it yet. His dad might say that he needs to find out someday, just to be funny, but Jeremy knows that he really doesn't.

Later, Jeremy will go online again and look up how far away Zion National Park's visitor center is, and the internet will tell him that if he cannot find anyone to give him a ride then he will need to walk for fifty eight hours to get there. Jeremy wants to go back to Zion and get his phone back so he can talk to his friends without having to worry about other incoming calls on the Hell's Bells landline, but he does not quite want it badly enough to walk fifty eight hours, at least not yet. Jeremy can imagine that walking for fifty eight hours could be interesting in the world of _The Library_ , but not so much in the real world, not even out in the desert where he might see a scorpion or a rattlesnake in the wild instead of in a zoo. However, he might reconsider that opinion if he ends up having to wait too long before the next time he's able to talk to any of his friends.

Or he might just explode, figuratively or literally.

Jeremy knows that exploding in the literal sense isn't really an option for most people. However, it feels like it should be, maybe because randomly exploding is something that happens to characters in his father's books all the time, sometimes after being injected with catalytic venom from giant spiders, sometimes from being exposed to the same radiation which creates all manner of giant animals, sometimes for no reason at all, and on one memorable occasion from eating a grilled cheese sandwich made with semi-rancid margarine, rye bread, and five-dimensional space cheese laced with antimatter dust. The five-dimensional space cheese sandwich, the time machine which brought it from the future, and the explosion which resulted from the sandwich being eaten aren't even a major plot thread in the book. In typical Gordon Strangle Mars fashion, it's just something that happens in the first chapter as an excuse to break open a hole in the earth and release a swarm of giant moths which develop a taste for human flesh after accidentally eating a woman while trying to eat the wool sweater she is wearing. That short lived character was partially based on Jeremy's mother and a sweater she had liked to wear at the time Jeremy's father wrote the book. Back then, she had claimed to think it was funny. Jeremy is not going to ask her if she still thinks it's funny now.

With nothing better to do, Jeremy quietly borrows his mother's keys and carries the rest of his belongings in from the car, even Talis's sword which has been rattling around under the couches in the back of the van for the entire trip and occasionally being briefly mistaken in poor lighting for a snake with very good posture. After another hour, Jeremy gives up waiting for a phone call that might be for him instead of for the chapel. If any of his friends have tried calling, then they almost undoubtedly got a busy signal or were told to call back later. He goes to bed, but he knows it will be a very long time before he will fall asleep. Not so far away there are thousands of people in casinos, gambling the night away, and Jeremy is jealous of them, not because he wants to gamble but because they have something to do other than staring at the ceiling and wondering if _The Library_ is ever going to say what happened to Fox or if her fate will just be an eternal mystery like so many more minor characters on the show who disappear and are never seen or heard from again.

However, Jeremy does not need to be jealous of the gamblers for very long, because as it turns out, something is happening much closer at hand than in the casinos. There is a quiet tap on Jeremy's door and a whisper of, "Hey, kid, Jeremy, are you still up, or did you fall asleep with your light on?" which makes Jeremy briefly wonder if the people of the Hell's Bells chapel might be as hung-up as his father is on keeping utility bills low. However, Jeremy is feeling more restless by the minute, so he gets out of bed and opens the door to find Miss Thing standing on the other side, still wearing the Frankenstein's Monster makeup but having changed his outfit for one that looked suspiciously like a Trainee Librarian, complete with the brass colored oversized prosthetic index finger given to all Trainees for enhanced shushing power until they learned how to perform the most effective techniques on their own. "We're about to have a late night wedding downstairs with _The Library_ as a theme, and your mother mentioned you brought a costume with you." Yes, Jeremy _has_ brought his costume with him, because it had either been that or leave it sitting crumpled in the laundry basket back home for however many months until they return ( _if_ they'll ever return, Jeremy thinks) so his mother had insisted. "Care to join in on the fun?"

Jeremy glances over his shoulder at where Talis's sword stands propped against the nightstand then turns back to Miss Thing and says, "I can be ready in twenty minutes. Less if I don't need the makeup or if you can help me with it."

And that is how, ten minutes later, Jeremy Mars finds himself once again dressed as a Forbidden Book (with the addition of Talis's sword strapped to his hip, just because it feels like it's important for some reason that he bring it with him, though he does not know why) and now following Miss Thing down a hallway of the chapel which he doesn't remember seeing before to yet another small room for performing weddings. He would have expected them to hold a _The Library_ themed wedding in the room which looked like a library, but apparently not, and when they step through the door and he sees the support pillar decorated like a giant tree with a podium and lectern growing out of it and the surrounding walls painted like a forest filled with fantastical creatures, he can understand why they have chosen this one instead.

The two men who appear to be waiting to get married are dressed like Hairy Pete and Ptolemy Krill, and they look vaguely familiar, kind of like the actors who played the pair of Bookworms who helped undermine the Forbidden Books' plot to destroy the World-Tree Library's Master Card Catalogue from which all other card catalogues were updated, but Jeremy does not pay much attention to them, because he only has eyes for the woman who they appear to have brought along as a friend or witness and is wearing a Fox costume which is somehow more perfect than any he has seen outside of the show.

"Hey, Mars, good to finally see you face to face," the woman says in that breathy-squeaky voice Jeremy knows so well.

The door swings closed behind Jeremy with a surprisingly deep booming sound, and he knows without looking that the door and its path back to his world vanishes before the last echo fades. As he steps forward with one hand outstretched to greet Fox, he thinks he is dreaming, knows he must be dreaming.

But, no, he isn't dreaming.

However, he won't have any proof of that until the next episode of _The Library_.

**The End**


End file.
